What is the recommended way to set up environment variables for a shepherd
service? Is there a profile associated to the environment of a shepherd
service where I could/should install required packages and have the correct
environment variables set up automatically? Specifically, I have a service
which uses gobject-introspection (from Python / python-pygobject), and had some
difficulty to get it to run recently.
context (a bit long unfortunately):
I have a shepherd-service which runs a Python script. The Python script
listens on dbus to check if my external backup hard disk is mounted, and starts
rsnapshot.
This worked reliably for many years, until a recent guix pull / system
reconfigure (moving from guix commit 461d773adead955e2daead70cee4415f7f0f00be
-- january 2025 -- to d8aa9af09f901d1745470caa45ffe2178a9afce1 -- april 2025
--so a rather large range of commits unfortunately). Suddenly, the Python
import statement
import gi.repository.GLib
would fail with exception 'ImportError: cannot import name GLib, introspection
typelib not found'. This seemed to be due to a missing GI_TYPELIB_PATH
enviroment variable, which I was able to fix manually by setting it in a
wrap-executable phase
(wrap-program (string-append out "/bin/listen_dbus.py")
`("PATH" ":" prefix
(,(string-append rsnapshot "/bin")))
`("GI_TYPELIB_PATH" ":" prefix
(,(string-append glib "/lib/girepository-1.0"))))
I'm wondering if this is the proper way to do this kind of thing? When
installing gobject-instrospection etc in a profile, I know these environment
variables are set automatically.
I'm also wondering which change caused it to stop working without setting
GI_TYPELIB_PATH after January... but that might be difficult to track down (I
see an update of python-pygobject happened in that timeframe).
Thanks for reading this far!
Thomas
